The best place to ask would be over in the Ultimate Campaign Kingdom Tracking Spreadsheet as Chemlak will likely see it there fairly quickly and be able to answer your questions for you.
Oh, and it looks like it's because of your fame from your buildings. Page 20 and 21 of Ultimate Rulership has the chart showing the buildings, including a column that shows which ones give you Fame & according to page 22 under "Fame" (first full paragraph on the page) states that any building that provides fame increases the towns consumption by 1.
That, combined with the amount of lots that your buildings are taking up (page 17 of Ultimate Rulership) it looks like your consumption is correct.
(I remembered this stuff after I suggested asking in the other thread.)
Having been a player through most of Kingmaker with one group and then being a GM many years later for another group the most important things I can suggest when it comes to kingdom building are:
1) If you have a plan (like what you've done) make sure to include everyone in the planning/get input from everyone. Sometimes a character might want something for a character driven reason and that is perfectly acceptable (eg: the Cleric of Desna in my current game wanted a shrine to Desna for obvious reasons.)
2) Make a note of what you plan on building as people will forget from one session to the next. (Group I was a player in always argued about what to build, come to a conclusion for the next month or three, and then argue about it again the next week because no one bothered to write it down.
3) Treat the city like a real, living, breathing city. Put in buildings that make sense for a starting village to have (inn, shop, smithy, etc) because it adds an air of realism to it.
Also, for Kingmaker in general: Remember, it's your world. Don't feel like you have to do things in a certain order or only do certain things because it's a role-playing game and it's what you think the book is expecting you to do. My players have come up with fantastic things and have totally turned some of the expectations on their heads once they realized they were able to.
Your GM should be flexible enough as it truly is a sandbox game to let you run with things. But be a nice player and give the GM some notice as to what your plans are... you're working with the GM, not against them. And if you do something totally unexpected ("We're going to avoid this plot-hook and go off in the other direction and explore something that you haven't prepared for just because we can") won't ruin anything for the GM... they'll just have to stop the game so that they can read what's over there and get whatever maps/minis are required thereby cutting into your gaming time.
Kingdom Building is boring to most people and I found it incredibly difficult to get people involved. Figuring out what would happen was discussed via a group chat between sessions that way everything was (mostly) figured out and it (mostly) prevented some players being bored.
Coming to a consensuses between games as to which buildings/kingdom improvements you want beforehand makes it go much faster. But be aware that sometimes things may to be changed depending on what's happening in the campaign. (Also, I got rid of the magic item slots and would make decisions as to if things could be purchased or not off the top of my head because rolling for them/the bookkeeping is tedious.)
As for districts:
Ultimate Rulership has it so that you can add a district if at least half the lots are filled with buildings and each square has at least one building. Adding a district costs 1 BP; consumption = 2 BP per district. (Page 17, found under "Metropolis" heading).
I don't recall anything about having to prepare the site like you do when you start a new settlement.
Any positive or negative increase to the city stats are permanent unless whatever is causing it says otherwise.
Same as they're only applied once unless it says otherwise.
Eg: "Outstanding Success (Settlement)" in Ultimate Campaign says "Fame increases by 1, your Treasury increases by 1d6 BP, and Unrest decreases by 2. You gain a +4 bonus on Economy checks until the next Event phase." So the fame and treasury increases are permanent but the +4 to Economy is only for one turn.
(Those are both very general statements that you may have to ignore if it doesn't make sense... I can't think of an instance where they're not true but that doesn't mean they don't exist.)
Also, for spoilers, use (with the spaces after the "[" removed in each instance):
[ spoiler=Movie plot spoiler]This is a spoiler, such as revealing who really did frame Roger Rabbit.[ /spoiler]
A fort improvement is meant to be an isolated building from your settlements, something that works as a barracks in the middle of nowhere. But if you happen to build a settlement in the same hex, that Fort becomes a Barracks and a Stable. Which means that you lose some Defense (2 points) because your fort is harder to defend with tents and houses around it, but also means you could build other defensive buildings to stack up that Defense higher than a standalone Fort could have. For instance, barracks + city walls + watchtower = 5 defense, if you add a castle you have stacked your defense way higher.
Does "settlement prep" take the place of one of the hex improvements that you can do that month, or perhaps does it take the place of the number of settlements you can create that month, or perhaps it doesn't count against either?
Here we have some confusion because the rules on UCam say two different things. First is that the preparation is done on a hex, not for a settlement, which is why we can't have two settlements on the same hex. But later it says that you must prepare the terrain for a settlement to create a new district. The latter is more specific, so it takes precedence.
Building a district works the same as building a new settlement. You pay for the preparation cost and by the end of the preparation period, the new district is ready for you to create buildings on it.
Preparing a terrain is a different "slot" than terrain improvements though. Preparing a terrain is only used to build new settlements and districts. While terrain improvement is used to build farms, sawmills, canals, fishery, forts, mines, etc.
What shadowkras said is also my understanding. The fort protects itself and its inhabitants. Once you clear the land and start building houses and farms all around, the fort's defensive value is diminished.
Note that each Fort also increases Consumption by 1 BP. But when they become a barracks+stable, that Consumption increase is gone. That means your defensive structure is no longer so useful, and thus you need fewer people guarding it.
Think about a walled structure with watch positions on all four directions on a high ground. Now suddenly you have hundreds of people living around that, blocking line of sight and causing noise or asking guards for directions or to solve their problems. That defensive position is still useful, but not as efficient anymore.
If they become a barracks and stables, they should take district slots.
Just noticed this thread (in case anyone wonders, I do drop in here fairly often to take a look at the latest posts about kingdom building, and I’m more than happy to get PMs from people, or posts in the spreadsheet thread that Warped Savant kindly linked to above).
Anyway, if anyone needs or wants my input, it’s fairly simple: shadowkras is correct. This will hold true for easily 99% of kingdom related questions.
The only thing I’d point out is that the fort and watchtower terrain improvements don’t “become” other buildings. Here’s a copy/paste of the fort text:
If this hex becomes a settlement, this improvement counts as one Barracks and one Stables building.
The watchtower text similarly uses “counts as”. This means that the hex doesn’t lose the terrain improvement. I’m actually undecided on whether the “counts as” should actually use up lots inside the settlement, but because the spreadsheet isn’t perfect the only way to simulate this right now is to add the buildings to the settlement and use up lots. I give these for free to my players, naturally.
It’s on my radar to try and get an actual answer to at some point, though, because I have exactly this conversation with my players every single time they create a settlement in a hex with a fort in it.
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That also makes sense. I simply assume they still take up some space within the settlement and for simplicity's sake, ask them to place their fort within the district limits.
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Am I correct in thinking that there are no buildings that reduce corruption? I'm not even coming across an event that reduces it. Crime can be managed by building jails, but you just get to accumulate whatever corruption occurs, barring GM involvement?
courthouse is -1 corruption, jails and magical streetlamps are -1 crime. Those are the only reducers that I know of offhand...
Ultimate Factions from Legendary Games has rules for increasing and decreasing settlement statistics as part of achieving faction goals (and a little bird tells me that it was put in especially because of corruption reduction).
*tweet tweet*
Farms only require a river if you’re trying to build them in a desert.
Here’s the terrain line:
Terrain: Desert (requires canal, coastline, or river), hill, or plain.
Note that the “requires” bit is linked to desert, but separated from the other terrains by the commas. This indicates that it’s only relevant to that one terrain type.
Oh, and before it crops up (because it almost always does): multiple terrain improvements is written less clearly than it should be. Here’s the rule as it should be:
Each hex may only have one of each type of terrain improvement, and only one terrain improvement that does not have an asterisk (so a hex can have a quarry or a mine, never both, but can also have road, canal, farm, and watchtower terrain improvements, for example).
Keep in mind that Kingmaker was written before Ultimate Campaign, Ultimate Rulership, etc.
The settlements you come across may not conform to the rules that were later laid out.
Huh. My bad. The game I’m playing where my players have a kingdom has a river twisting through the kingdom area, so I’ve never needed to use that rule, to the extent of completely forgetting about it.
Quickly checking, the original kingdom rules allowed farmland on any grasslands or hills hex that had roads (2BP for grasslands, 4BP for hills) and no settlement could be in the hex. So Oleg’s was a pretty good spot if a road network got invested in early.
Under UCam, it’s still viable, just head SSE to Nettle’s Crossing, claiming hexes and building roads along the way. Farms become viable 2 hexes away from Oleg’s.
Am I correct that, under UCam/UR, it's feasible just to build a canal in the hex where Oleg's trading post is (not adjacent to any kind of river/water) and the water requirement for farms is taken care of?
Only if you can convince the GM that the act of digging canals will cause them to automagically fill with water despite not being connected to a river or other water source. There's a lot of stuff in even the UCam rules that assumes that the GM is going to adjudicate things in a sensible way, such as not letting the players build a 'city' comprised entirely of 12 breweries, 12 libraries, 12 mills, and nothing else in order to get +24 to each of economy, loyalty, and stability.
Short version: yes, that works.
Longer version: while a canal terrain improvement states that it allows a settlement in the hex to count as if there's a river, the terrain improvement table superscript 4 indicates that farms can be built in hexes that have or are adjacent to a hex with a canal. Canals can be built on desert hill or plain hexes, and there's no requirement for linking them to any sort of existing waterway. As such, a canal can be built in the hex that Oleg's is in, and ticks the requirement for farms in that hex and all the adjacent hexes. As that hex is a plains hex, it will cost 2 BP for the canal, and 2 BP for the farm. Note that this will be both of the terrain improvements you can perform in a single kingdom turn while your kingdom size is below 11.
Edit: but as Indraea says, the GM might veto it.
If you are building your way from a hex with river towards Oleg's, then you probably already have the requirements to build farms there:
Farm cost represents the BP cost to cultivate a hex for farming. a Farm must be within or adjacent to a hex containing a river, lake, swamp, or Canal, or adjacent to at least 2 hexes that already contain Farms.
Oleg's is about 5 hexes away from the bandit fort, you need 2-3 hexes with farms along the way so you can build farms on Oleg's.
Actually, if you own the rickety bridge's hex, you can build a farm on the gold mine's hex and make your way with a farm in every hex until Oleg's. The gold mine hex is fine because it's 1 hex away from a hex with a river (rickety bridge's hex).
This means you need the following hexes with farms when noted:
Stag Lord Fort
River Crossing
Rickety's Bridge
Gold Mine (farm)
Forgotten Cache (farm)
Spider Nest (farm)
Bokken's Hut (farm)
Oleg's Trading Post
There are similar paths that require one less hex, but its really all too similar. But I would rather get that gold mine as soon as possible for that extra +1 BP per turn.